Why is it that sales’s first reaction to something new is to give it away?

I know that I can’t be unique here.  We develop a really cool new feature/module/functionality.  Early validation and customer feedback is hugely positive.  Phrases like “game changing”  “revolutionary” “must have at any cost” are bantered about.

Then comes time for mainstream release, and without question, the sales organization demurs that it should be “bundled” in.  Or offered “gratis”.  Or become part of the main product.  This happens time and time again, and really frustrates the marketing side of my persona.  We just developed something that is a huge value add differentiator, and we have an opportunity to increase our market visiblity and share by a period of exclusivity.  And the stakeholders who can take this and run with it uniformly believe that we should give it away.

They want to turn it into a checkbox in the presales evaluation process.  Huh?  Really?

Sigh.  If the work I do to find differentiation generating features nets to no increased value, and the work of our development team truly does nothing more than fill out a checklist for a presales evaluation, then why bother.

The lowpoint of product management.